Obama’s Speech: Guns and Government

“So, together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis,” President Obama said on Tuesday night. “And we can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is stronger.” Which rubble, which crisis? Obama had just mentioned the “grit and determination” that got us through “a decade of grinding war,” a conflict that began in the wreckage of the Twin Towers; followed by “years of grueling recession,” related to a different kind of collapse in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan. Grit, grinding, grueling—all of that brought him to a fourth G-word, government. This is a year when the President needed to use the State of the Union to offer a coherent counter-argument to the Republican raging against government in all its forms. He succeeded reasonably well, with the help of another G-word, one that gave the speech its emotional force: guns.

Obama came into the chamber in the middle of what is effectively a blackmail negotiation. We are less than a month away from sequestration—the set of blind, deep cuts that were put in place to try to make Congress focus—and a possible government shutdown. John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, who was sitting behind Obama, looked none too happy to see him, though he did manage to fidget marginally less than Joe Biden. Boehner had started the day by saying that Obama didn’t have the courage to make a budget deal. Obama seemed to answer that, early in the speech, by saying that, as bad as a sequester would be, heading off defense cuts by “making even bigger cuts to things like education and job training, Medicare and Social Security benefits” would be “even worse.”

This was a tactical message: don’t count on me being the grownup, who will agree to anything to stop Congress knocking things down. (He has been that before.) Obama added,

The greatest nation on Earth — the greatest nation on Earth cannot keep conducting its business by drifting from one manufactured crisis to the next. We can’t do it.

Not all Republicans would agree. (The applause was polite, but not overwhelming.) For an entire wing of the G.O.P., a dysfunctional government, whose only visible activity is mismanaging crises, is not an embarrassment but the vindication of a worldview. This is an essential divide, which the President returned to. “We won’t grow the middle class simply by shifting the cost of health care or college onto families that are already struggling or by forcing communities to lay off more teachers and more cops and more firefighters. Most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—understand that we can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” Obama said. (See John Cassidy’s post on Britain’s failed austerity experiment for some practical evidence of that.) He talked about the business, as well as the fairness, sense in investing in better schools and raising the minimum wage, that last measure being one even Mitt Romney had spoken about favorably.

At the mention of Romney’s name, a number of Republicans in the room, including Paul Ryan, settled into a sort of frozen cringe. It was even quieter than when Obama tried to tell a joke about ribbon cuttings. (You had to be there.) As it went on, the evening conspired to emphasize the G.O.P.’s lack of credible spokesmen. The official response, from Marco Rubio, was a rote anti-all-government speech punctuated by a nervous out-of-frame lunge for a bottle of water. Rand Paul’s, on behalf of the Tea Party faction, swung more widely, with dark intimations about debt, free phones, and Montesquieu.

The President managed to get at some of the inconsistencies in the G.O.P.: the supposed deficit hawks who fight against closing any last tax loopholes, for example. (He didn’t entirely address his own—drones, for instance.) And the amnesia about what made America strong and rich: he compared other countries’ high-speed rails to our “deteriorating roads and bridges,” quietly shedding rubble. But Obama’s rallying moment came on the subject of guns.

He began in Chicago, where Hadiya Pendleton, a girl who had performed at his Inauguration, was shot and killed. He had some simple gun measures, he said—background checks, limiting “weapons of war” and high-capacity magazines—and they ought to be brought up before Congress, and voted on. Pendleton’s parents were at the speech; so was former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (another name to put in Obama’s set of G-words). Her wounds, from the shooting that killed half a dozen people, kept her from being able to clap; instead, she clasped her hands and shook them as Obama’s speech crescendoed:

They deserve a vote. They deserve a vote. Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote. The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence—they deserve a simple vote.

There were cheers, and even chants. With that, Obama returned to a distinctive vision of participatory government that appears regularly in his speeches. The two devices he used to convey it were crises—confronted rather than manufactured—and, since this is the State of the Union, special guests.

The speech closed with tributes to three of them. The first was a nurse named Menchu Sanchez; she sat next to Michelle Obama. (The First Lady, hard to miss, was wearing a dress that looked like a poor combination of both Glinda and the Wicked Witch’s—not her best.) Sanchez was representing the effects of Hurricane Sandy; she had worked at N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, whose sorry state David Remnick described at the time of the storm. When Sandy “plunged her hospital into darkness, she wasn’t thinking about how her own home was faring. Her mind was on the twenty precious newborns in her care and the rescue plan she devised that kept them all safe.” (Obama also connected Sandy to climate change, an issue he addressed in an emotional but scattershot way.)

The second was Desiline Victor, who was a hundred and two years old, and had to wait for hours to vote in Florida—a movable crisis in voting rights that the President addressed earlier in his speech. Victor was born in 1910; she is the rhetorical cousin of Ann Nixon Cooper, the hundred-and-six-year-old woman Obama mentioned on the night he was elected in 2008, and her story is powerful for similar reasons—born in a time that valued her differently, holding on to cast her ballot. Obama described how the people in line with Victor “erupted in cheers when she finally put on a sticker that read ‘I Voted.’ ” The audience stood to applaud Victor, who looked great. Boehner didn’t. What is confounding, in particular, about voter-suppression efforts is that getting people to the polls is the best bulwark against government overreach. Earlier in the speech, Obama said that he wasn’t looking for a bigger government but “a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth.” And yet the objection with which he contends is not how to make it smarter but whether anyone should bother.

Then came a police officer, Brian Murphy, who was one of the first responders to the mass shooting at Oak Creek; despite being hit with a dozen bullets, he told his colleagues to save the congregants first. “When asked how he did that, Brian said, ‘That’s just the way we’re made.’ That’s just the way we’re made,” Obama said.

Caring for children, enabling access to the polls, and stopping gun violence. By end of the speech, they were patched together in a rough sort of package. Now we’ll see how far Obama can carry it. The families from Newtown, or anywhere, not only deserve a vote, they deserve to vote. And they deserve to do so coming from somewhere other than a tragically empty classroom, or under a crumbling bridge, or in the midst of another disaster—or listening to the absurd debate, in Congress, over another manufactured crisis.

Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images.

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